Buzzing Around The World With Fellette & Doug

North to Suez...

Early this morning we passed safely from the Arabian Sea past all that nastiness around Somalia and Djiboti, without pirates, of course. The journey to the Southern entrance to the canal will take three days, that is a lot of miles. We don't really understand the sizes of foreign places until you actually travel them or in this case sail on them.

Many people would be hard pressed to put a finger on a map and have it land close to the Red Sea. Yet it is likely one of the more important waterways of the world. The route to or from the Suez Canal is through the Red Sea. In the next while I hope to have some boring statistics about the activity on the canal.

Why is it called "The Red Sea"? On our bed tonight is tomorrow's agenda. The lead article is "Naming the Red Sea". I will not retype the paragraphs that in a nutshell explain that nobody really knows why it is called the Red Sea! Scholars will dispute this no doubt.

For some reason the clocks are going back another hour tonight even though we are basically heading north. The captain earlier in the voyage said that he could do whatever he wants on board and he appears to be doing it. I think he got us on Egyptian time, so he did the right thing even though we are not in Egypt yet.

This is a time of rest and a transition from a very busy time in Africa and India. We have a few days to relax before the extremely busy time in the next three weeks in the Mediterranean.

Tonight was an Egyptian Themed Dinner. The waiters looked great and so did the women who were bold enough to try out their Saris bought in the last week or so. Fellette tried on the Sari we bought for daughter J.



[don't tell her, is a surprise.] When you see how lovely women look in Saris, it makes one wonder why they are not more popular in the west. Basically they are one piece of light cloth, five or six meters long. About 19 feet by one meter wide. The colours are endless, the price is cheap and they cover well!

As you can tell, I am having a hard time coming up with anything startling to report. The most exciting thing that happened today was us passing a tug towing an oil rig up north in the morning. The sun was rising in the East over Yemen.

Two more days to the Suez.

posted by Doug and Fellette @ 8:18 PM